Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State Department officials said, and may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record.

Mrs. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act.

This is dumb on many, many levels and there appears to be no excuse for it happening. First off, using a personal email as Secretary of State seems like a massive privacy and security risk. While one hopes that there was at least some attempt to better secure her personal account by government security experts, it's still almost certainly less secure. Given how much sensitive information the Secretary of State has to deal with, it seems inexcusable that she was allowed to conduct official business via her personal account. That to me seems like an even bigger deal than the part that everyone else is focused on: the failure to preserve her emails as required by law.

Of course, the failure to preserve the emails is a big deal as well. But here's the really stunning thing: there is simply no way that Clinton and others in the administration didn't know that she was supposed to be using a government email address and preserving those emails. That's because both the previous administration and others in her own administration got in trouble for using personal email addresses. As Vox notes, towards the end of the Bush administration there was a similar scandal involving a variety of high level administration members using personal email to conduct government business and to avoid transparency requirements.

That scandal unfolded well into the final year of Bush's presidency, then overlapped with another email secrecy scandal, over official emails that got improperly logged and then deleted, which itself dragged well into Obama's first year in office. There is simply no way that, when Clinton decided to use her personal email address as Secretary of State, she was unaware of the national scandal that Bush officials had created by doing the same.

That she decided to use her personal address anyway showed a stunning disregard for governmental transparency requirements. Indeed, Clinton did not even bother with the empty gesture of using her official address for more formal business, as Bush officials did.

But that's not all. What the Vox report doesn't note is that the scandal actually carried over to the Obama administration also, as the White House's first Deputy CTO was reprimanded for using his personal email address as well, early in 2010. So there was both a scandal about the similar use of private email accounts in the previous administration and in the Obama administration. It's impossible to believe that Clinton or the other key people who worked for her in the State Department were unaware of one or both of these issues while she was using her personal email address.

While the White House's email system may be clunky and annoying to use (as I've heard repeatedly), there's simply no excuse for Clinton not to have used it at all -- and for the emails she did send not to be preserved as required under the law. A few years ago, we mocked Homeland Security boss Janet Napolitano for refusing to use email entirely -- though at least she was upfront about the reason. She didn't want to be held accountable for what she said -- though, the reality was she would still have staff members send emails for her. Clinton appears to have wanted to be free of that accountability as well, but to still have the benefits of direct electronic communication herself. In short, she purposely ignored the law for her own benefit.

from the paranoid-much? dept

Francis Gurry, the head of the World Intellectual Property Organization, seems to be running from scandal to scandal these days. While it has shown brief moments of enlightenment, for the most part, WIPO tends to be an organization very supportive of the copyright and patent maximalist agenda. Last year, we wrote about two incredible scandals that directly involved Gurry. Despite WIPO being a part of the UN, Gurry apparently defied UN sanctions against both North Korea and Iran to give them computers, in the wacky belief that those countries would use the computers to bolster their local patent system. Gurry, apparently blind to the fact that North Korea, especially, was desperately seeking computing power for its nuclear program and had very little concern or need for a patent program, seemed to think that this was a good idea, and even defended the decision, though he agreed to kill the program.

The latest, however, involves a few more crazy scandals, including accused attempts to sneakily set up WIPO offices in both Russia and China and (even more bizarre) trying to surreptitiously collect DNA samples on employees he was convinced were sending anonymous letters. First, the DNA situation:

Among them, an embarrassing case involving DNA sampling. Prior to his election, Francis Gurry had been the target of anonymous letters. Convinced that the letters’ authors were among those within his entourage, the successor of Kamil Idris filed a complaint with the prosecutor in Geneva in October 2007 and surprisingly authorized the police to enter WIPO’s premises to take statements and DNA samples. But the suspected employees later discovered that additional samples had been taken from their offices without their consent and thus illegally. On November 13, an ex-employee – who was made redundant after a corruption allegation of which he has since been cleared – filed a criminal complaint for “slander” with the prosecutor of Geneva. His lawyer sent a letter to the representatives of the Member States informing them that this procedure would require them to vote to lift Francis Gurry’s diplomatic immunity.

Given all of this, many are questioning why Gurry should be allowed to stay in charge of WIPO. A bunch of Congressional Representatives had raised some concerns about Gurry about a month ago, but with this latest story, they've sent another letter to Secretary of State John Kerry expressing their serious concerns about allowing Gurry to continue to lead WIPO:

As you may recall, concerns were expressed following reports that Mr. Gurry was running a secret
program to ship high-end computers and other electronic gear to North Korea and Iran. When called to
account, he claimed that U.S. law did not constrain him, and he refused to cooperate with an investigation
by the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Since the time of that letter, the situation at WIPO has substantially deteriorated. As you know, the recent
annual meeting of Member States collapsed due to the revelation of secret agreements made by Gurry to
open satellite WIPO offices in China and Russia -- we understand that he even proposed opening an office
in Tehran.

But even more disturbing, we understand Gurry is involved in a scheme to illegally acquire DNA samples
of WIPO employees in a failed effort to develop evidence to support a personal complaint that he had
filed with the Swiss authorities. There is also concern that he has been working since to suppress this
information and to prevent any independent investigation of it.

Yikes. It would seem that WIPO is quite a disaster currently. That's not to say that a new leader would necessarily be any better, but it would appear that the series of scandals around Gurry, many of which include incredibly serious charges, raises all sorts of questions about WIPO under his leadership.

from the um.-wow. dept

While the good folks over at Valleywag might have you believe otherwise, most tech execs lead rather boring lives. There aren't that many "scandals" that happen around these parts -- and the ones that do happen, tend to be rather mundane. Some stock option backdating and maybe a bit of lying on the old resume, seem to be about as scandalous as it normally gets. But Henry Nicholas of Broadcom apparently decided to go with the more made-for-Hollywood sort of scandal. There is the option backdating issue here, but that's nothing compared to the fact that he's now been indicted for also keeping a warehouse full of drugs which he used for things like putting ecstasy in other tech execs' and customers' drinks, as well as supplying speed, cocaine and pot to tech execs. And then there were the prostitutes. Oh yeah, and the sex lair that leaked to the press last year. There's definitely a movie coming out of all of this one day. In the meantime, though, I think I prefer the Silicon Valley with more mundane executive scandals.